Less than 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
by Neftzer
Summary: Two in my Fare Thee Well Series. What might happen when you set out on your bike to find answers to the big questions, but end up instead speaking some  harsh words to Duncan in "Avatar" about the irrelevance of lost love. Set primarily in Chicago.


Note: This story was completed in November 1999. It is to take place as follows:  
Highlander: Fills in information about certain characters between episodes _The Messenger_ through to _Avatar_.  
My own fanfiction: pre-If I Should Not Return, (you may wish to have read this, though things here will still make sense without having done so, only reading this story first will rob you of the big reveal in that one)  
A very complete outline of timelines and further explanations and disclaimers may be found at the end.

* * *

****

(Less Than) 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: Two in the Fare Thee Well Series  


Richie: _"I think I'm gonna head out of town for awhile, just get on my bike and try to figure some stuff out."_  
Duncan: _"The big questions?"_  
Richie: _"Oh, yeah."_  
Duncan: _"If you don't find the answers, keep looking."_

* * *

Richie Ryan easily opened the door into 4D of his apartment building in Chicago. The door was made of heavy industrial steel, creating the appearance that unannounced visitors were unwelcome. However, it had not been locked, so he had no fear of being uninvited. Besides, this particular tenant was usually up before five, dressed and ready for the day long before he would allow himself to make a social call-no matter how often he recently had wanted to show up at odd times, and without reason.

Pushing through the doorway, the metal snaps of his leather jacket softly chimed off the doorjamb. Richie heard low singing coming from a corner of the open studio space. The tones echoed off the uncluttered blue-grey block walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, the sounds reverberating slowly, like noises submerged in the water of a pool. A few of the low notes died against the soft cover on the bed pushed into one corner, while others travelled higher, reaching back to meet with newer variations on the chant.

He knew that it was originating in the deep western corner of the cavernous space, behind two rice-paper screens that ensconced a small shrine, replete with candles and crucifix.

The chanting did not seem out of place when he paused to consider it. The expanse of the room and the way light played off the imperfections in the windows' glass had often reminded him of a cathedral. A sort of inner-city tabernacle. Something by I.M. Pei.

Of course he never had been one for knowing about architecture. Perhaps the image of this space as cathedral-like was formed more by his knowledge of what and whom it held.

He was wearing soft soled shoes, so his entrance had gone unnoticed. Still, he paused respectfully at the edge of the screen, until he both heard and smelled a lighted match; a cue that his angel had almost finished.

* * *

It had been several months since Richie Ryan had died in the arms of Sister Mary George, Benedictine nun. Of course he hadn't known that at the time. Hadn't even known her name. He had never died like that before-in someone's arms-revived minutes later still in their grip, been able to see the horror and confusion churning in their eyes like and oil and water. The closest he had come to anything like that was when Mac had found him lying near Tessa, and that was a scene he preferred not to think about.

When he had gasped to life there on that El platform, in that awkward life-death embrace and looked up at her, it had seemed the natural response to greet her for what she was, something not of the earth.

"Hello, angel," he had said. In retrospect it might come off sounding a little tacky, a little cheesed. But at that moment Richie truly believed that he had seen his heart in her face. In the area between her eyebrows, where her every emotion translated into a series of significant movements. In the shape of her mouth, unable to settle on any word appropriate for such an occasion-and so it said nothing.

In that face, encased in its dark blue veil that hid the rest of her as well as did the habit she wore, Richie had felt an undercurrent of some of the things for which he had been searching. The answers to the big questions seemed much closer than they had been only moments before, when his blood had yet to stain her hands and lap. When they could possibly have missed one another altogether in the Chicago night.

__

No, he amended. _We could never have missed each other._ He was certain that he would not have had to die. He could have found her-recognized her-anywhere. As easily as he could recognize his own face.

* * *

Richie rounded the corner of the screen just in time to see her placing the small gold band she wore on her ring finger at the altar, below the crucifix hanging on the wall.

He tried to suppress his buoyant mood at seeing her-her day was obviously not going so well. "What's up?"

"I saw Mother Abbess today."

"And?"

"It's over, I think."

Richie crossed the space to her, letting one of his hands touch her on the shoulder, tentatively. The light pressure instinctively turned her face toward him.

She looked up at him through her eyelashes, her chin lowered as though she no longer deserved to hold her head high.

"Over?" he asked, increasing the pressure to a slight squeeze.

"I've left. Signed the necessary papers, given a forwarding address."

"Don't do this," he tried to reason. "Not on account of me. Don't make me feel like I'm the one responsible. The one trying to turn you-" Words failed him. "To the Dark Side."

"Don't worry," she tried to joke. "You're nowhere near as handsome as Darth Vader." A tear slipped out, travelling quickly to the side of her nose, where she rubbed it away defiantly. She was trying not to feel her shoulder where he was touching her.

Richie had not meant it to come to this. He thought things could have stayed constant a little longer. _No, that was not true._ He wanted things very much to change, only he didn't want to feel like he was literally playing the Devil's advocate. He had not intended to enter into a competition with the figure hanging from the crucifix or His mother, much less place first in such a competition.

"It's like you said," she offered in a way of comfort. "Sometimes you have to choose which world you're going to live in. My actions over the past few months have made the decision for me. It had become very evident that I couldn't stay."

He made a move to add his other hand to her vacant shoulder, but she side-stepped out of his reach entirely, his first hand once so pleased with where it had been now left dangling worthlessly at his side.

After such an unexpected announcement, Richie did not fool himself into thinking he knew what her next move would be.

"So what will you do now?"

"I have to go," she said. "Or both of us will always question whether I left only because of you." She choked the _you_ back quickly and substituted, "because of this."

Neither had to ask for further clarification.

"No," he verbally jumped on the thought. "You don't have to do that. I'll go."

Her chin jerked back over her shoulder in surprise.

"That is," he forced himself to slow down, to sound more nonchalant. "I'm going." He spread his hands, a gesture of assurance left over from all of his best cons. "I was planning to leave anyway." He threw in some foolish comments about how he needed to feel the road under his tires again, how he was itching to see Paris, and how it might have changed since he left.

"But your identity," she asked. "You're dead there."

He spoke casually, as if he changed his name for breakfast. "If I run into problems, I'll become someone else." He shrugged. It wasn't like he even had a very good idea about who to contact on his own to pull off such things, but he'd have to learn sooner or later. The odds seemed against his being able to remain Richie Ryan indefinitely. Just as they seemed stacked against her remaining Sister Mary George. "I know up until now you couldn't talk about your past life-weren't supposed to," he began. "But who were you before Sister Mary George?" It was a question he had long wanted to ask. "Who will you be now?"

She turned around to face him and lifted her hands to her head, where she began to take off the dark blue veil that he had never seen her without. Two smooth hand motions expertly disengaged it. Another pulled it away, letting its fabric flutter in one hand as the other self-consciously flexed up to her hair, cropped short in the haphazard no-nonsense cut that the Order had required.

He thought it was right that she was blonde. That all those months she'd been toting her own secret halo around. Her hair was bright, like it was electrified. _Perfect._ That her hair should, as well as the rest of her, make him think of light.

"Caitlin Michelle," she said, presenting herself to him, as though they had just met.

Richie knew he was going to have to walk out of the apartment in a moment and leave her and this place, get on his bike and look for answers somewhere else for awhile. He knew that it was the right thing to do. He also knew he was going to kiss her before he went.

Walking to her, he took the veil from her hand and deposited it at the altar on top of the ring. As he turned back to face her they were closer than they had ever been since that night on the platform. Once again he could smell her skin, hear her breathing as it deepened and lengthened in a studied rhythm to combat what might come next, and once again he could see his heart in her face. _Breaking._

"Welcome, Caitlin Michelle," he said, letting both his hands go up to her face, lightly tracing her cheeks, and following quickly with his mouth, in case she changed her mind.

She did not, and inside he wished-prayed even-that he could be kissing her free and clear of the fact that he was going to walk out the door as soon as he stopped. The prayer must have called down a higher power. He found himself stopping at just the moment he thought he would go on-go on and scrap the whole idea of heading out at all. He pulled his mouth away, but left his hands on her face, his calloused fingers and palms against the smooth cool softness of her skin.

"I love you," he said. He knew the cleft in her brow meant she was wondering if he meant it. If he did this sort of thing very often.

The three freckles high on her cheekbone rippled as a tear slid across them.

"I do," he insisted and took a step back before he lost the ability to move at all. He thought one more tear was all it would take to crumble his resolve. That, or if she spoke.

__

If she speaks, he thought, _that'll be it, I'm staying._ He wanted her to speak, for her to keep him here, to change what was about to happen. He wanted to hear her voice again.

She did not speak. No other tears fell, but her hand came up to her heart and splayed over the top of her breast, grabbing and clutching at her dress, wrinkling its blue fabric in the gesture.

Richie turned on his heel and left as soundlessly as he had arrived, but at the last moment he pulled the door closed with a loud slam that surprised him by its force, as though it had punctuated the end of something. A sentence, a fight, a relationship.

He refused to let himself think of it as a sign.

Less than an hour later he was packed and in the alley on his bike. He craned his head for one last look of the fourth floor, where he imagined he could see her against the glass, watching him go.

He knew that she did not know whether he would come back, whether or not to trust him or anything he had said. But then hadn't the same guy who just told her he loved her claimed resurrection from the dead? Hadn't he come back to life in her arms?

For now he would ride, he would pretend to forget. He would do what she wanted. But he would be back, and he would find her.

* * *

Laying on her back across the double bed, Caitlin realized that it had been two months since he had left. A very gloomy two months. No one to haunt her path as she went about her chores, to tease and flatter her into a better mood. No familiar face to hand trays to be washed at the soup kitchen where she still worked.

"Will you be getting married, then?" several Sisters had asked when they found out she had decided against pledging perpetual commitment. Their faces were shiny with expectation, full of goodwill for her, and benevolently lacking in any unkind word or thought about her leaving the Order, and her vows behind.

"No," she had to tell them, _always no._ She could see that they were confused. Everyone knew that a man had been a key force behind her departure. A man that was no longer around. It could not seem to them that she had made the right choice. She had broken with the Order, saying she was also planning to leave town, but then, days later, she was working with the oblates, back to most of her old duties and charities, only now minus the habit. Most of them still called her Mary George.

She could not believe that it was enough to have left on account of Richie, no matter how his face could smile back at her, or how much she loved him, loved his unpredictable nature. It was passion, she believed. That's what she loved in anyone, whether it was the passion of one of the Sisters for prayers and helping people, or Richie's passion to make her laugh. His tenacity in all things.

How could a person stand in the path of all that and not be moved? Not be shaken to their very core? _Something about him,_ she thought, _was without limits. His soul._ It was simply too large, too expansive to fit entirely inside of him, and so naturally some of it seeped out-into the air around him, over things he touched, into words that he said. She let herself wonder for a moment where he was now, who was receiving his attention. Whether they could see his soul as clearly, as beautifully, as she could.

In the early morning she liked to do this, before the day had broken into dawn, before there was even enough light to see all the way to the ceiling high above. She had been unable and unwilling to try and break herself from the habit of early rising, despite there being no matins to attend, no more early chores delegated to the former Sister Mary George. Nonetheless she still left her bed before five-thirty, staying in after five only on days it rained. Days like today.

She did this as a sort of memorial to Mitch, her father. In all the years she had lived with him-before he had passed on when she was eight-a rainy day meant a bit of extra sleep and quiet thought in the double bed-their only furniture besides two chairs and sometimes a table-that necessity forced them to share. Often they would have to affect odd positions if their current roof (usually tin) was prone to leaks.

Mitch had been alone for most of his life, comfortable with very little-often whatever he could stuff into the smallest U-Haul trailer (the only one he could afford to rent). He had the bed, the set of chairs, some clothes, two quilts, and a sister in North Dakota.

Caitlin had been just shy of two when her mother-whom she could only vaguely remember; a tall woman to a two-year-old's eye, with long blonde hair far past her waist, and a taste for wild times and creme de menthe (the smell of which still sent Caitlin into a whirlpool of memory)-had shown up with her at Mitch's doorstep, claiming Mitch was the father of her child, outlining his connection through her daughter's middle name, Michelle. _Because I couldn't remember how to spell your last name,_ her mother had apologized.

It had not mattered that Mitch Horn had only briefly known the tall blonde, and that had been four years prior. Her mother, Missoula, (she had re-named herself after the last town they had lived in) announced on the spot that she was ready to settle down and be a family now.

That readiness had not lasted out the month, and soon it was just Caitlin and Mitch and some empty bottles of creme de menthe.

When she thought about it, it puzzled Caitlin as to how she had come by this kind of information. Surely she could not have remembered it coming from Mitch, who had never said a single unkind thing about her mother, or professed any doubt of his parentage. Possibly she had picked things up from her aunt, the Sister, whom she had met upon Mitch's death.

Sister Bernadette, or Dette as Caitlin had been allowed to call her, was by no means vindictive or angry about their situation-she was quite willing to take on the child her late brother had accepted as his responsibility. It was perhaps only that she was fear-stricken that this unknown child left to her care would turn out to be too much like the mother. A foggy-headed, directionless but kind woman-girl who had abandoned her daughter to a near-stranger over seven years ago, and in the interim had not returned or even called to see how the child might be doing.

At sixty, Dette had not had much experience with children, and though Caitlin did not mind the sparseness of her new life or the austerity of her new home, she did miss her Mitch, and something seemed to have irrevocably altered with his death. Something that manifested itself in her simple day-to-day existence. She woke up one day to find that she was now addressed quite formally as Caitlin, and never ever again as Mitch had dubbed her almost immediately, as Cat.

* * *

The sounds of the Chicago, Lake Michigan rain came to her through the tall glass windows, beating a light rhythm that occasionally altered when the wind picked up. She would rise soon, but first she shut her eyes for one last time to conjure up a happier place.

The dark wood of the cabin's surroundings disrupted the texture of light as it struggled to come in through the two small windows on the other side of its single room. In the corner, the one they had errantly decided would leak the least, they were in bed, waiting out the storm before preparing for the day.

"Well, my Cat," Mitch asked, hands clasped behind his shaggy white head. "What should we talk about today?"

"I want my song," she had said, from her own place opposite, her tiny frame struggling to mimic his posture.

"Ah," he said, a laugh wrapped up in his tone, "a bit of a rainy day serenade." He cleared his throat and began the tune that he had marked as hers and hers alone. "_See the marketplace in old Algiers, send me photographs and souvenirs. Just remember, through all the years, you belong to me_."

His voice had always held a beautiful bass timbre, rumbling into the bed frame, tickling the covers against her skin. She had been so happy. _So happy._

* * *

Losing consciousness, as well as the resolve to get up, Caitlin drifted back into a light sleep. The past two months had not been restful for her. They were filled with a startling kind of dream.

"I love you," he had said.

Her cheeks were left burning from where his hands had rested. It was not the right thing to say-she was fairly sure-and then walk out, despite the fact that she had been planning to leave herself. She had formed no intention of telling Richie that she loved him before she left. No matter how true the statement might be or how much she wanted to declare it. And she certainly had no intention of kissing him-or letting him kiss her.

But there it was. He had, and she had not exactly been a dead fish. _Had she moaned?_ When he left she had walked over to the corner, feeling like she needed some support, something solid to lean into. She had moaned then, even as she had let herself cry, moaned and keened from the pain he had left her in, that she had allowed herself to walk into. Moaned from the knot that he had tied, tightly somewhere inside of her, like a cramp whose muscle she could not find to massage and alleviate the hurt.

She did not know if he was coming back, did not know if she wanted him to come back. She only wanted release from whatever he had placed in her, this longing, this continual anticipation that invaded her dreams and her days, like the anticipation of death might sustain the suffering.

The dreams were always the same; a suspension of that final moment in the kiss before he pulled away. Sometimes her hands came up to his face, or the back of his neck, where they aggressively attempted to bury their grip in his short cropped hair. Sometimes they grabbed for his shirt, pulling him closer. Or-and these were the times that disturbed her most-they found their way up the inside of his shirt, feeling out the muscles and shape of his back with an urgency she had not realized she possessed. An urgency that drove her back into his mouth, her hands fumbling with her own clothes as well as his.

In all of this, the Dream Richie was never surprised or hesitant, his speed and intent always matching hers. She had reached a point of frustration and anxiety so that she dreaded thinking at all about the kiss, knowing that she would wake as always, feeling the knot more keenly than ever, and knowing, always knowing, that he had not said that day two months ago that he ever planned to return.

* * *

It was a little after dawn in South Chicago, and Richie Ryan's Watcher was just about to pack it in for the night. If Jack Preston had been allowed to share such things with his girlfriend across town, he could have detailed chapter and verse where the young immortal had been over the past eight weeks, as well as what an exhausting trip it had proved to be.

As things were though, he was in for a tongue-lashing over not coming to bed until after dawn, smelling of stale cigarettes, beer and peanuts from one of the rougher taverns in the Windy City, and neglecting the needs and desires of his partner, Sharla.

Sometimes Jack could honestly say he hated his job, and he sincerely wished he had not been called in to replace the pretty redhead who found herself unfortunately too pretty to remain discreet and retain her cover as the Watcher of same Richie Ryan.

If he had not been pulled from his comfortable position in Seacouver where he and a staff of six had been compiling files in preparation for the final hearing that was necessary to close the open chronicle on Methos2, he would not have been dragged to Paris (his French was a bit too textbookish to command much respect there) on some wacky-there was no other word for it-scheme to save a chateau and blackmail a casino owner.

But he had been assigned to follow this guy-in actuality not much older than himself-and since the return from Paris a week ago, they had spent the last three nights here in this gutter called St. John's Street, Ryan looking up at the fourth floor of a building across the way, Jack looking at Ryan, and asking himself why. He missed his books. And his bed.

Ryan lurched away from the wall.

__

Thank Darius, Jack exclaimed, almost aloud from relief. _He's going to go up._ Jack had no intention of following. As he watched from his discreet distance-not that Ryan would have noticed him anyway, he'd spent the night getting plastered-Jack turned to go without even making sure his assignment managed to cross the street, much less navigate the elevator once inside. He was too busy thinking ahead to a soft place to fall, and the coming afternoon (Ryan would be sleeping one off) when he could get over to the local HQ and research (the thought almost made him catch a second wind) the mean-looking mound of flesh whose lady friend Ryan had unwittingly offended at the bar.

* * *

It was not the insistent pounding that woke Caitlin after she had fallen back to sleep, it was the sound of the bottle smashing against the heavy steel door of her apartment. She sat up on the edge of the bed listening to hear what other noises accompanied it. More pounding, then nothing. After a moment she grabbed the bed sheet-she had no robe-and went to see what, or who, it was.

By this time the pounding had started up again, and someone was shouting, but through the door it was hard to tell what was actually going on. Taking the fastest-though more dangerous-route of finding out, she opened the door.

Richie stood in front of her, among shattered glass from a bottle that, by the wet stain on the door, had been smashed in his zeal to be invited inside. Now, swaying slightly back and forth, he was reciting in his best Scottish accent, a love ballad, his eyes closed tightly in reverence so that he had not noticed her.

"Oh my love," he carried on in what he felt was the way a passionate Scotsman would. In the way he had seen Duncan do at times when they had both had too much. "Is like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June. Oh my love is like a melody played sweetly in tune."

He hiccuped, but beating at his chest bravely soldiered on. "As fair art thou my bonnie, Cat, so deep in love am I, that I will love thee still, my dear, 'til all the seas gang dry."

Deep breath. "'Til all the seas gang dry," he repeated, launching into the third stanza and opening his eyes to look for the customary bar table to pound on for effect, but finding none.

He was in a brightly lit hallway and not a pub, and that realization-as cloudy as it was-had thrown his rhythm irrevocably off. "Fare thee well," he stumbled verbally, unable to find his place. His eyes finally settled on the doorway that until so recently had been the focus of his only desire, to be let in. Someone was standing in it, someone all in white, and the glare from the hall lights was more than his tired eyes could focus under.

He staggered forward for a closer inspection, a look of pleasant surprise on his face.

She caught him at the last moment, which was no easy feat, nearly two-hundred pounds of muscle and bone-none of which seemed disposed to work correctly at that moment-careening into her out-stretched arm, the second arm struggling to hold the sheet around herself.

She did not have a chance to think of any alternate plans other than half-dragging him inside once he had fainted. It was soon apparent that she could not manage to keep her dubious hold on him long enough to get him much further, and thinking that he would stay passed out for the journey, she removed the bedsheet, laying it out next to him on the floor. She was now wearing only an old, barely-bottom-covering long sleeved thermal top. She was able to roll him over onto the sheet which she began to drag across the hardwood floor and to the corner that housed the bed.

Only moments into the slow trek, she heard his voice again. Still at the old parlor trick of goofing off Duncan's accent.

"And the rocks," he had found the right place. He was immeasurably pleased with himself, though he did wonder where he was being taken like this, dragged around inside a sheet. "The rocks melt with the sun," he flung his arms wide. "And I will love thee still my dear, while the sands of life shall run!"

His arms, still extended, caught on a table leg, preventing them from going further, and someone-in the half-light he could not tell who-came back to disentangle him. "And fare thee well while!" he shouted his thanks to the someone for getting them once again on their way. "And I will come again, dear Cats, though it were ten thousand mile!"

* * *

She hoped that he would pass out again. It made her job at the head of the sheet easier. But he did not. Fortunately he offered no resistance when, once they pulled up alongside the bed, she bent over to commandeer getting him up and onto the mattress, which had never seemed like such a far distance before. He switched modes then, and began lightly singing, although it was no tune she had ever heard, and his enunciation was now nonexistent.

When she had him up and in, and had successfully removed his second boot, she grabbed the sheet from the floor where it had been, snapped it in the air to get off what dust she could-she had only one set of linens-and let it fall across the bed and its new occupant.

Her face was very close to Richie's as she leaned over him to tuck in the sheet. He had stopped singing and was relatively quiet now, but she could still smell the kick of liquor on his breath. His eyes, unfocused and glassy since he had arrived, for a moment took on a clarity that connected him more with the man she had known. _Knew._

"Nice," he said, smiling at her from his location swaddled among the bedclothes like a child. And then he turned over slowly, asleep before he could even completely shift his weight into the new position.

* * *

It was Tuesday at six-thirty in the morning and Cat realized that she had nowhere to be. That she could stay here, curled up in an afghan by one of the large windows. Usually she liked to sit with the side of her face to the pane, the cool of the glass sometimes sending a chill down her spine. But today she put her back to the outside and sat looking off into the corner of the room that held her unexpected visitor.

Her mind was racing much too quickly to stop long on any one thing. She wondered that she had even been able to keep moving, to get him inside and over to the bed at all. That she hadn't frozen in place on the threshold when she realized that it was him. The one thing, the one person, she had been wishing for had arrived, delivered like a care package-half again as heavy-on her front stoop.

She was suddenly hit with how fortunate the manner of his entrance had been. There had been no time for awkward pauses on her part, or the halted speech that such occasions often elicited from her. He had come back to her simply needing someone to make sure that he didn't fall into anything, someone to tuck him in for the night. All things that she had been able and willing to do.

__

What if that was all he had come back for?

She pulled her bare knees closer to her chest under the already stretched-out thermal top in a protective gesture. It was how she reacted to most bad thoughts-to make herself small, as though she would then go unseen, untroubled by whatever had scared her. _What if he had only needed somewhere to crash, and in a few hours would be on his way again?_ She dreaded the awkwardness of his waking. She remembered her dream and blushed. She did not think she could let him leave again. She did not know what to do.

And then it came to her.

Getting up from her place by the window, she walked to the bed, the frayed edge of the afghan trailing behind on the floor. He was still asleep. She lifted his arm and let it drop, an old trick she had learned to use on Mitch. It fell as heavily as lead. _Out like a light._ It was all too easy to get his pants and belt off, throw them into a heap on the floor at the foot of the bed. The difficult part came when she had to debate whether he usually wore his watch to bed, and if she needed to undress him further-removing boxers and t-shirt to make an illicit encounter look plausible.

She finally gave up, concluding that if this was supposed to be a night that he couldn't remember, it was more than possible to assume that his usual (she should have blushed at the thought) behavior might not have been observed.

She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced, warding her mind away from thoughts of outcome and consequences, as she let the afghan drop to the floor, leaving her colder from the thighs down. There was no fear of waking him as she climbed in. His peaceful breathing did not alter.

For awhile she balanced herself on the cusp of the edge, narrowly avoiding falling off and onto the floor, but she was unable to sleep, too aware of both who she was near and the deception she was in the middle of carrying out.

She allowed herself to turn over and face him-his back to her-and propped her head up on one hand. She had given him the only pillow. His right hand lay next to his face, flat to the pillow, and she watched for some time how his breath gently moved the red hairs across his forearm, like the tide. She watched for so long that she began to breathe in the same rhythm as he did. And when her arm finally cramped up uncomfortably from supporting her head, without a moment's hesitation she slid gently over to where Richie lay, this man who had haunted her dreams, the back that she had touched in them a thousand times expanding and contracting with the motion of his breathing. _Here, now._

Sharing space on the pillow, her mouth and nose came close to the warmth at the base of his neck. His hair smelled slightly of cigarettes and shampoo and something inside her brought her up short at tasting his skin to see if it were, as she imagined, salty.

Tentatively she brought her arm under his and around to his chest, where she willed it to rest in a light, casual embrace that she hoped portrayed the correct image of the night she wanted him to think they had spent together.

She knew that Richie was honorable. He wouldn't leave the morning after, not if she could convince him he'd bedded her. She could not let him leave. _This is the only way to be sure,_ she told herself. _This way he'll stay whether he was planning to or not. This way he'll stay._

* * *

Richie Ryan woke up staring into the light blue-grey paint job of an unfamiliar wall. Also to an unfamiliar smell, which he soon enough realized was his own hang-over. Slowly he took stock of himself in the strange bed.

He usually ran this like a check list. _Eyes? Blink, check. Mouth? Tongue sweep along teeth and gums, check. Fingers? Clench, check. Clothes? Slight roll of shoulders and hips, check mostly dressed; t-shirt and boxer briefs. Legs? Gentle flexing, check. But...something else down there too. Someone else's legs messed up with his own. Someone behind him. But who?_ His brain seemed to give off a tiny, but effective scream of pain to warn him off each time he struggled to recall the night before. _Whose legs?_

A hand that was not his own flexed against his chest, and he followed the motion down to where it played across the front of his grey t-shirt. For a moment he thought he recognized it. The slim fingers that did not even bulge out for knuckles, the flat nails with small but perfect half-moons, the nail trimmed neatly close to each fingertip. _But that was impossible._

Keeping the rest of his body as still as possible so as not to wake the other person, he turned his head as far back as it would go, and his hunch was quickly confirmed. There, snuggled up behind him, her bare legs erotically intertwined with his, her hand in possession of his chest, lay Caitlin. Her hair was as wonderful and bright as he remembered it to be, and her mouth, open only enough to hint at her front teeth, reminded him of exactly the last thing the two of them had done together.

If Richie had not been so wildly upset, he would have been overwhelmingly aroused.

What in the name of all things good and holy had he done last night? It was not supposed to have happened this way-if it were to happen at all. He had, in a moment of-an evening of-an early morning of-drunkenness...done what?

__

Great shit, Richie, he thought, _you're supposed to remember this kind of thing!_ Unconsciously he responded to his own lecture with a whine.

The noise caused Cat to shift and slowly wake.

__

Okay, Richie coached himself in response. _Just go with it, just-be cool, Man. See where it goes._

* * *

Coming around for the third time that day, Cat felt the beginning twinge of an unpleasant headache-the kind she got when she had been sleeping for too long. For a moment that distracted her enough to keep from recalling that she was in bed, and not fully dressed, with another person.

"Oh," she said, when she went to move her right leg, the top of her knee and thigh extricating themselves from between someone else's inseam. Startled, and now nervous, she jerked back onto her own side of the bed.

Richie sat up and faced her. "Good morning," he said, addressing her in her now rather distant spot opposite him.

"Good morning," she responded noncommittally, scooping up the afghan from its place on the floor until she could scout out her clothes for the day.

He looked good. Really good. His eyes were clear again. He looked wonderful. _Go over to him. That's what people do, not just hang out half a room away and exchange greetings. If you want this to work-for him to stay-GO OVER THERE._

She made her way to the other side of the bed, afghan grabbed around her, and stood, waiting for what came next.

* * *

Richie reached for her hand, and she instinctively stiffened, but let him take it.

__

What, he asked himself. _What did I do? Did I hurt her?_

He thought he'd never seen her look more frightened. He knew he could be strong at times, maybe too strong, and he knew that she was half his size, and she didn't-hadn't-that she was not experienced. If only he could remember anything about last night.

He recalled the image of a bottle smashing, breaking into a thousand pieces at his feet, and shouting. But he couldn't place whether he had been angry at the time, or why he was throwing things and shouting.

The expression playing on her face must have mimicked the one visible on his own. Both afraid of what had happened. Cat, he thought, because she could remember it, him, because he could not.

A pair of brown deer-caught-in-the-headlights eyes looked down at him from under her halo of hair and he thought one thing. That he needed to leave and try to piece yesterday together. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted his pants on the floor at the foot of the bed. He stole a look at his watch.

"I'm sorry," he began, playing absentmindedly with her hand, unable to meet her eyes. "I've got somewhere I have to go today." _Was he becoming one of those guys?_ "So, I need to go now, but we should, we should go out tonight. You know, a really nice dinner. I'll be back in a little while." He stood, let go of her hand, and retrieved his pants.

Before he walked to the door he planted an almost brotherly kiss on her temple. It was not lost on him that in response to even the lightest touch, all of her skin seemed to bristle.

* * *

Once he had gone, Cat walked over to the windows. _See, _said a small voice inside her, _see how eager he was to leave? He never would have promised to come back at all if you had not made him think he was somehow bound here, to you._

Another voice also questioned his departure. She squeezed into the odd angle necessary to see her reflection in the window-the only mirror-type surface in the apartment.

Had she changed so much? She knew that she had dropped some weight since he left, and that she had not been sleeping well either. But was there something so repulsive about her that he hadn't wanted to repeat this morning what he surely thought had taken place the night before?

She narrowed her eyes and stared harder.

* * *

Four hours later he had returned, showered (she did not know where), his clothes changed from the night before, a garment bag slung over one arm.

"For tonight," he offered, hanging it in the nearby armoire.

She did not have the heart to tell him that she didn't own anything to wear to a 'nice dinner.'

But then, as far as her heart was concerned, she could hardly look him in the eye.

* * *

Richie thought he wasn't going to make it to their dinner if she kept looking at him that way, like she couldn't stand to be around him, her eyes combing every aspect of the room except him.

If his journey out this morning had cleared up anything, it had shown him that he would simply have to ask about last night point blank, as the only information he had been able to glean on his own was the smashed bottle, some yelling, and once blacking out-none of which revealed much.

Taking off his jacket and laying it on the table, he moved to the still unmade bed.

"C'mon over here," he offered. "There's something I need to ask you about."

She made her way across the floor, and perched skittishly on the edge of the bed. Her arms refused to lay casually at her sides, instead knotting up across her chest, one fist tucked under her chin.

He did not know how to say it other than just to say it.

"Cat," he began, his hand wandering across the sheeted space that separated them. "I don't know what happened last night between us." He hoped she wasn't going to cry. "Honestly, I'm sorry, I hope I haven't-"

"Are you going to leave?" she asked, her voice small and uncertain.

"What? No. I don't want to leave," he paused. "I mean not unless that's what you want." He hoped that it wasn't. "I'm just afraid that last night, when I, when we, that I might have hurt you, or..." He rolled his wrist so that his hand lay palm up, in a gesture of supplication, but she still would not look at him.

"I can't do this anymore," she said. "Besides, I'm so bad at it anyway."

She had the tone women use when they're breaking up with you.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "I'm not sure what happened last night but-"

"Nothing happened last night."

"Nothing? But this morning, we were here, and our clothes were so not being worn."

"It was a trick," she said, looking down at her hands, then off into the distance. "I did that so you would stay. I took off your pants and belt and climbed in with you so that when you woke up you'd think something happened." Finally she turned to face him, for what must have been the first direct look she'd given him all day. "I'm not very good at lying," she apologized. "I haven't done it in a long time, and it makes me very unhappy." Her confession complete, she fell silent.

Now, unlike before when he couldn't catch her eye, he could not evade the weight of her gaze while he tried to understand what she was saying.

"You can go," she said. "You don't owe me anything."

His mind had not quite heard the last statement when he spoke. "So you're saying that it was all a set-up. To make it look like we'd-?"

"Yes." She bit her lower lip.

His hand still lay there, waiting for hers to join it.

"For the past three days," he began, "I've been watching you from the alley, wondering what you were up to." _Looking for a sign,_ he thought to himself, _that you still wanted me._ "Yesterday I gave up and decided to come see you. I should apologize because coming to that realization required the ingestion of a rather toxic amount of alcohol, but I won't. I have been going around all day worried that I had hurt you, misused you in some way." He took a deep breath. "I'm very glad that you let me in whenever I arrived, and I'm gladder still that nothing happened between the two of us," he moved to counter his assertion. "Not because I wouldn't like that, but because my state of intoxication would have deprived me of a wonderful memory."

He stopped waiting for her to take his hand, and instead took hers. "I don't want to leave," he assured her. "If you invite me to I would very much like to stay." He waited to see an answer in her face. "And regardless of whether you ask me or not, I want very much to go to dinner with you. Soon."

"You should know that I love you," she said, watching him slide up close to her, feeling him along the side of her, his other hand resting on her waist.

"I know," he nodded, smiling.

__

Twinkling, she thought.

"I wasn't so sure yesterday."

She turned, surprised at his saying that, wondering how he could ever have doubted her feelings, or missed what she thought was so obvious as to be a given.

They had been very close together before she turned. Now there were mere millimeters between their mouths. She opened hers to ask a question, but as she did, their lips brushed against each other, feather-light. She lost herself a little then, following it up with a real kiss, that as their first, proved hard to break away from.

"How do you know now?" she asked.

"Well, it's not everyday someone fake seduces you just to get you to hang around." He smiled. "At least not in my experience." He nuzzled at her nose and cheek with his own, growling playfully into her ear. "Now get dressed. Or I leave without you!"

* * *

Half an hour later when Cat stepped out of the bathroom, Richie had changed into a suit jacket and tie, collared shirt, and nicely pressed pants. She was dressed in the best she had; the gathered calf-length skirt she had managed to cut down from her habit, a white oxford from a recent trip to the Goodwill, and her nondescript pair of sensible navy pumps.

He didn't have to tell her-she had eyes-but he did anyway.

"This isn't going to work," he said.

"I know," she agreed. "We don't even look like we belong at the same table." She shrugged. "But it's all that I have."

"No," he shook his head, disbelieving. "That can't be right." Moving to the armoire, he started pushing through the clothes on hangers. Thirty seconds later he was done, and seemed to be giving in. "Wait," he advised her. "I think there might be, something-" He stretched into the far corner where she could not see what he was going after. A moment later, he had an armful of plastic bag that he was extending to her. "Why not try this on?" he asked, hustling her back into the bathroom and hanging the white bag on the shower rod.

It took her a little longer than she expected to get into the yellow silk sheath. For awhile all she could manage to do was sit on the commode's cold lid in her slip and look at it, hanging there on her lonely shower rod, where only yesterday there was just a plastic curtain, which as far as she could see was as good as nothing. Yesterday there had been nothing. And now there was this. From nothing to beautiful.

* * *

When she walked out, she felt awkward and clumsy in a way she hadn't since high school.

"Wow," said Richie, turning from where he had been inspecting some papers lying out on the table.

"I'm sorry," Cat apologized, "I only own dark nylons, so I'm bare-legged."

"Wow," he said fluttering his eyelids and slightly shaking his head. "Just, wow."

"You don't think it will be a problem?"

"Huh?" He had to pull his mind back from where it was headed just to answer her.

"My legs," she prompted. "Being bare."

"Well, walk over here," he said, just so he could watch her, and she did. He took her hands in his, the beginning of a grin tugging at his mouth. "No, I don't think your legs will be a problem." _Unless they stop traffic,_ he thought.

"Thank you," she said, "for a wonderful evening."

"We haven't even left yet."

"I know." She thought about kissing him, then thought better of it-if they were ever going to leave. "Let me just get this paperwork-" She faced the table. "Into an envelope, and I can drop it off on the way to the restaurant. I've put it off much too long anyway."

"What is it?" he asked, not letting go of her hands.

"The paperwork to get my name back. I have to file these and then get a hearing."

"So you'll be Caitlin Michelle then?"

"Caitlin Michelle Montana," she confessed. "I sound like some washed-up country western singer." She smiled apologetically.

"Well, as long as you're changing it you could change it to something else, right?"

"Yeah, but I couldn't think of anything else. I mean, what? Caitlin George, Caitlin Smith, Caitlin who?" She though it would be easier if she felt like she knew more of who she was, who she was becoming.

"Richard's," he offered.

"Richards?"

"Definitely," he agreed. "The more I hear it the more I like it." He lifted her hands to his heart. "If you like it."

"I do," she answered, acutely aware of the ache he had left her with, aware that he was offering her the chance to heal that ache, put it behind her. The ache would be gone from her life, because he would take its place.

"Richard's, forever," he said, thinking that he was not sure he had ever spoken more important words, to anyone. Thinking that he had somehow said just exactly what he had come back from France to say.

And as she bent to fill in the last bit of the form, she could feel his hands warm on her shoulders and his lips against her neck when they came together as one, over the petition on the table, and made it legal and binding.

* * *

The door into 4D pushed open, making a faint creaking noise against its hinges, as if to say, _I wished you'd just stayed in,_ but Cat and Richie did not notice, and they walked over the threshold still feeling the pleasant after effects of their night out on the town.

It had started with a ride on the back of Richie's bike, and taken them up Lake Shore Drive to their dinner, after which they had wandered along Navy Pier like any other pair of lovers in the city with no particular place to go, and the desire to see and experience everything with one another.

When the water coming off of Lake Michigan gave Cat a chill, Richie had produced his leather jacket, which, now that she was home, she took off.

Richie accepted it from her in such a way that she realized he was planning to leave for the night.

She did not let go of her half the jacket. "Stay," she asked quietly.

"Don't worry," he reminded her and smiled crookedly. "I told you, I'm not going anywhere." And he kissed her, only causing her to increase her grip on the part of the jacket she still held.

"Stay here tonight," she asked, kissing him back harder, deeper, demanding.

"You don't have to do this, Cat," he said, although part of his mind was yelling at him for trying to throw any obstacles in the way of such an invitation, no matter how appropriate or chivalrous such obstacles were. "I'll still be here tomorrow and the next day. I've already promised you that. A promise that had no prerequisites." He stopped after that, because once she started peeling off his suit coat and shirt, his mind was no longer able to entertain complex thought.

"I know," she agreed, transferring her grip away from the leather jacket, which dropped to the floor at their feet, and onto the knot in his tie, which was giving her a hard time.

When she felt his hands move to the zipper of the yellow dress, she paused, and when she heard the fabric catch, stopped him. "No," she said, "don't spoil the dress."

He found himself laughing. _She was worried about the dress._

"I'll be right back," she promised, disappearing into the bathroom after taking her afghan off the bed.

* * *

When she came out, a few short moments later, he had removed his tie, but nothing more. He realized that, along with all the other things coursing wildly, and even familiarly, through his veins, there was also a fear. Something that he was not sure he had ever felt before. Something unspecific and unnamable. And whatever it was, it placed more significance on this event, than on the many others like it in his lifetime.

* * *

The afghan hung about her frame like a heavy drape, tiny pieces of her visible through the crocheted weave. It was black and trimmed in bright red. In both use and beauty it had seen better days.

"I have to tell you something," she announced, took a deep breath and mumbled in a small voice.

"A piano?" he asked, walking nearer, responding to the only part that he'd understood.

"Sister Brigid," Cat said, half-heartedly. "She taught me how to play honky-tonk piano. We weren't supposed to."

"Ooo-kay," he said, finding this a peculiar start to things. "And then what did you say?" He wondered if she were going to ask him about the past. He thought about Marina LeMartin, how that had been silly and how he didn't really want to have to mention it to Cat.

"I've done this before," he heard her say barely, in an even smaller voice.

"Oh," said Richie, and moved to her, not really sure what to think, or where such a confession would lead.

"His name was Vance," Cat said. "And we hung out in high school. We liked shoplifting and listening to the Cure."

"Shoplifting?" Richie coughed. _Cat shoplifting?_

"And the Cure," she said. "I guess that's what you do when you're raised in a convent."

"Vance." His mind really was not keeping up. He was stuck back there somewhere with shoplifting.

"Uh-huh." Cat winced. It was not the most romantic of memories. "Prom night, in the back of his truck."

"You went to prom?" Richie asked, feeling a little shell-shocked. First theft, then boyfriends, now prom. It had been a long time since he had thought about high school. Even longer since he had dropped out.

"No, we were hoodlums," Cat explained, slightly rolling her eyes. "We didn't go to prom, we had sex in the bed of his truck instead." She could see that she had Richie at a bit of a disadvantage. Why then did she want to giggle? There wasn't anything very giggle-worthy about her relationship with Vance, was there? It had been so long since she had tried to recall anything about it.

"You didn't have to tell me this," Richie responded, hoping desperately that he was not going to be expected to call out the names on his list, starting back with Lisa Gooding in ninth grade.

"Actually," Cat stood with her back to him, and let the afghan droop, "I sorta had to."

Richie saw her naked back, and perched low at the base of her spine, the worst tattoo he had ever seen. And he had seen plenty. It was just slightly smaller than a drink coaster. The kind of tattoo that hadn't been very good to start out with, and now had faded with time. A once blood-red, now yellow-pink rose, twined with barbed wire that spelled out the name V-A-N-C-E.

"Oh my God," he said, his eyes growing round at the sight.

"Are you upset?" She no longer had the urge to giggle. His exclamation had suddenly put things on a much different course.

"It's just-" he said, incredulous.

"I'm sorry," Cat said, hiking the afghan back up, ready to retreat into the bathroom and change back into her clothes if she were rejected on the strength of Vance and her past.

"No, wait," Richie called, shaking his head from side to side for emphasis. "I'm not upset. And there's no reason for you to be sorry. I'm surprised, yes, but truthfully, I'm also a little relieved." He decided not to mention the part about the hideousness of the tattoo. She didn't have a mirror, and even if she had, it would have been hard to maneuver to look at it. She probably hadn't seen it in years. "Really," he asked, trying to reconcile what he had been told with the woman in front of him. "In the back of his pick-up, on prom night?"

"Mmm-hmmm." She nodded her head.

They both sort of giggled.

"That was ten years ago," she added. "I never thought I was in love with him, even then."

"It doesn't matter," Richie said, walking to her and taking her hand. "It's just you and me now."

They walked toward the bed.

They started kissing again before they got there. His shirt came off, and then his undershirt, and somewhere in the middle of everything, she dropped the afghan leaving their bare chests touching. She was nibbling at his shoulder when she heard him say, "I'm not sure I'm gonna make it to the bed."

She bit down a little harder.

He made an unintelligible noise. "I don't think I can walk."

But it was okay. The afghan was already there on the floor, and it wasn't much longer before they joined it.

* * *

Jack leaned back on his usual spot in the alley. Following Ryan around today had been no easy task. To the gym for a shower, and a change of clothes from the ones he left there in his locker, a shopping trip that encompassed the women's department at Marshall Fields, following him up and down Lake Shore Drive trying to operate his own late model Celica with the grace and efficiency of Ryan's bike. And now, having to decide whether or not to stand around waiting. He knew Ryan was probably up there with his girl getting laid.

Jack tried to remember the last time Sharla had been feeling pleased enough with him to put out on a week night. _Forget this,_ he thought, pocketing the pen he had been using to draw. _I'm going home._

He took one last look at the face he had been sketching from memory, the face of Ryan's girl, and quietly shut the leather-bound notebook. Jack didn't much like blondes, but he had only to flip back a few pages to see that Ryan did not share his personal fascination with brunettes. _Let him have the blondes,_ he thought, _plenty for the rest of us._

Sharla, he said to himself like a secret greeting, as he waited impatiently for the last bus.

* * *

The next morning when she woke, Cat was certain she was still in her dream. Her life still frozen in that last instant before Richie had pulled away from the kiss and walked-practically at her request-out her door and out of her life. She would open her eyes now and there would be her room, her place, and on her refrigerator-nothing. No postcards or letters, no photographs or souvenirs, nothing to show that the person she loved so entirely existed outside of her own memory.

She had dreamed something new-an evening on the floor, her shoulders bare against the hard wood, her skin-and his-indented with the knotted yarn of her afghan. And then, slowly making progress to the bed. She was there now, but somewhere in the night, in the heat of her dream, she must have lost the pillow.

She wanted desperately to stay trapped in this barely-waking reality with Richie, but her mind tugged at her to find the pillow, and she opened her eyes.

__

It had not been a dream. Only centimeters away from her lay Richie, every bit as naked as she was. She had a moment of embarrassment, just a moment, before rolling over into him. Without waking, his arm instinctively moved to embrace her, and Cat snuggled into him as tightly as she could, her fists balled up near her chin as she looked into his sleeping face.

__

Don't cry now, she told herself. _People don't cry now. This is when things are good. This is when you laugh, and tickle the other person. This is not when you cry._ She did anyway, just a little, a few tears. She sniffed and rubbed her hand under her nose.

Her entire life, all she had ever wanted-ever needed-was to belong. She had often wondered if it wasn't because her mother had left her. And then Mitch was gone, and then Dette. She had tried to belong to Vance, but he left her too. _All gone._ So she had chosen Holy Orders. At least God wasn't going to disappear. She could belong to him.

But then she had met Richie, and she realized sometimes you had to choose where to belong-how much to belong. Partly to punish herself for abandoning the Order-she thought-she had tried to close herself off from Richie. But it hadn't worked. He had let himself in through her dreams, and she really wasn't that strong at resistance. He had already possessed something of her-that was why she realized she couldn't give her whole self as Sister Mary George. Someone else had parts of her. She had become part of someone else.

Now she belonged. She had a home, a place. She was his. _Richard's._ It was really very silly that this made her want to cry.

When she was finished and her hand pushed aside the last of her tears, the movement finally woke him.

His eyes opened slowly, and Cat was afraid. Afraid that she wouldn't see in them someone she knew. But her fear was unconfirmed. They were the same eyes that had miraculously opened to her that night on the El platform. Compassionate and happy eyes. It was Richie.

He smiled.

She hoped he couldn't see that she had been crying. She didn't really want to try and explain that.

His embrace tightened as he wished her a good morning.

"Do that thing again," she asked.

He laughed, going over in his mind the catalog of what had occurred the night before, wondering exactly which 'that thing' was.

"You know," she prompted him, "the one where you-" and then she blushed, unable to complete the account.

He laughed, and she felt his laugher shake both of them as well as the bed.

"No, I don't," he claimed. "I think you're just going to have to show me."

"I love you," she said, before diving under the afghan.

"And I love-" but his response was cut short.

* * *

"What time is it?" he asked, two hours later, thinking vaguely about breakfast.

"Six, maybe?"

"Six, and you're still in bed? What's the matter with you, young lady?"

"I might not leave all day."

"Well if you don't leave," he pretended to demand. "Who's gonna cook my dinner?"

"You know I can't cook." She liked being teased.

"Can't cook?" It still shocked him.

"Well, there were plenty of Sisters responsible for cooking. When they found out I had no talent in that area, I was assigned something else. About the only thing I can manage is canned soup, or toast."

"Was your mom a good cook?"

Cat thought for a moment. She tried to remember. "I think we ate a lot of baloney."

"What about Mitch?"

"Fish, and beans out of the can," she confessed. "Sometimes potted meat."

"Living high," he said.

"We were happy." She knew he had not meant to imply that they had not been. But she liked saying it anyway. "So who taught you, Mr. Big Shot?"

"Well now, I was born knowing about grilled cheese and hot dogs."

She giggled.

"But most of the stuff I know, Tessa showed me. The fancy-schmancy stuff? All Mac."

"Tell me again about Tessa."

And he did.

* * *

They would do this some days, in the early morning before breakfast. Lay in each other's arms and share memories. He would tell her about Tessa and Mac, Amanda, people from the old neighborhood-whoever came to his mind. And she would talk about Mitch and the Sisters. She rarely said anything about her mother or about Vance and high school, unless he asked specifically. They were harder things for her to think about.

* * *

Richie felt peaceful. He felt happy. It seemed very possible that things would go on like this forever. That he could reclaim a bit of his mortality, a life without violence, or the threat of impending violence. A life with someone he loved. Someone who loved him back unconditionally.

He still practiced diligently, and had long ago goaded Cat into taking lessons from him as well, but one day when he unsheathed his sword he realized that it had been more than four months since he had felt a Buzz. It was a good feeling. A clean feeling.

* * *

Jack Preston told himself he didn't miss research very much after all. Besides, if he had known how easy Watcher field assignment could prove to be, he'd have requested a transfer long ago.

He felt like a new man. He and Sharla were getting on as well as (from all appearances) Ryan and his girl Caitlin were.

In fact, things were going along so smoothly, he had yet to back up his notebook accounts onto disk-not that there was anything too revealing or urgent recorded here. Entries about going to the opera, or hockey games. Wandering aimlessly through any number of parks and museums. Stopping on a whim to spend a quarter in an arcade playing Pac-Man and Frogger. A perpetual shopping errand to pet stores where the couple tossed around the idea of buying a dog.

About the most interesting thing, speaking posterity-wise, was the daily, and sometimes twice-daily, swordplay lessons being given up on the top floor of Ryan's building, which Jack managed to watch through a telephoto from the comfort and solitude of some space he had rented in the warehouse next door.

Things here were going well. He could not ask for more. HQ was too pre-occupied with tying up the many loose ends and rampant speculation on the Four Horsemen to trouble him very much at present. He was so content he had even begun putting on weight. No easy task, considering both his and Sharla's lapse in ability where the kitchen was concerned.

* * *

And then one day when he arrived to view the day's lesson, he found a letter that had been slipped under the door of his little office overnight. _Be careful,_ it read. _I think he's made you._

It puzzled Jack for a moment. He was fairly sure neither Ryan nor Caitlin were savvy enough to anything going on outside of themselves to have noticed him, although in response to such a belief he undoubtedly had allowed himself to become more sloppy of late.

Then he knew. It was from another Watcher. The one for Macon, the immortal that Ryan had offended all those months ago. Jack had met the guy's Watcher-whose name he couldn't recall-while he was researching Macon for an entry in Ryan's chronicle.

Believing that their respective charges might be headed for a confrontation, the two men had agreed to steer clear of one another; one hiding more easily than two under such circumstances.

It would not have been difficult for his co-worker to find the request for leasing this space, though. Watcher policy made all acquisitions and requests for funds public record within the society to discourage both jealousy and preferential treatment. The warning must come from him.

Jack thought about calling HQ to fax him a statement of policy for such an event. He thought about calling Sharla out of some need to assure himself that whatever else should happen that she would be safe. Then he thought only of getting himself out of there, out the building, the neighborhood, the entire city. He could talk to HQ about it face-to-face. He wasn't going to wait around here, not when Alan-that was the other guy's name, Alan-had possibly risked his own cover just by getting into contact with him.

* * *

Jack raced out of the building and into the street. He knew there was a pay phone at the corner, he had passed it many times. It was still there, as always covered in graffiti, the phone book missing, the receiver hanging off the hook, dangling into the air.

He picked it up and searched frantically for change to place the call. He looked up to deposit the coins. There, pasted to the glass at his eye level was a Polaroid. It would only have seemed unusual to him that someone might choose a phone booth to post a photo in if he had not recognized the woman as Sharla, and the man. It was Macon, face squeezed in the frame next to Sharla's, and holding up Ryan's chronicle. Jack's hand went to his coat pocket. A similar leather-bound notebook was there, but blank inside. It had been the day he would start a new volume. Now Macon had Sharla (he tried very hard not to dwell on that-he needed to think), and all the information about Ryan that his records could give him.

Below the Polaroid, on the white space, a phone number was written. Jack didn't have to look at it twice to know that it was his and Sharla's. He heard the coins drop and dialed.

* * *

It was early afternoon when there was a knock on the door of 4D. Cat was wondering where Richie had gone to; he had missed their practice session earlier in the day, but she knew there were times when he got caught up in things and forgot the time. She told herself it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Even though he had not come across any immortals in the time they were together, it was something that always nagged, slightly, at the back of her mind. He had explained early on that if one night he didn't come home, or he missed an appointment without calling that she shouldn't worry. _Just sit tight,_ he had promised. _I'll find you._ She believed him, but the tiny dissenting voice remained.

Cat answered the door.

"Hello," said a clean-cut young man in a long dark coat.

She wondered if he were selling something. He had that sort of demeanor, anxious and overly-friendly.

"My name is Jack Preston, and please, could I use your phone to make a call?" Sheepishly he offered, "I'm locked out of my apartment."

"Okay," she said, shrugging her shoulders. He did look familiar. She left the door open, though, just in case something else was going on. Despite her belief in the basic goodness of people, Cat had lived in South Chicago for several years, and there was no longer any habit or affiliation to protect her now.

He followed her over to the kitchen where she pointed to the phone. She was walking away, not wanting to eavesdrop as he picked up the receiver.

Once her back was to him, he had the long phone cord around her wrists, knocking her to the ground and winding it around her ankles as well.

It did not occur to her to scream. Something put the events happening into a sort of slow motion, her fall taking the same length of time as an entire afternoon. When she hit, her arms and hands not free to catch her, her front tooth wedged her bottom lip against the floor, splitting it and causing it to bleed.

"What are you doing?" she asked, tasting the blood and grit from the floor. She wrestled around trying to get away from him, but he was sitting on top of her, straddling her back and she couldn't throw him off.

He had finished the job of tying her up. He was surprised she hadn't screamed. He had imagined any amount of violence; biting, scratching. He had expected to have to knock her out. But it was better this way.

She saw into his eyes from where her head was angled at the floor, making her neck ache. Even her breathing hurt, her stomach bearing so much weight, his and hers. She saw now that she had been wrong. His eyes were not overly-friendly. They were anxious, desperate eyes. This man was scared.

"Our Father," she cried out in prayer, but had not the breath to speak loud enough for her neighbors to hear.

"Be quiet," he said.

Something in his voice silenced her in its urgency.

"Be quiet and listen." He pulled his sleeve up and showed her his wrist tattoo. "Do you see that?" he asked. "That means I'm not here to hurt you, or to hurt Ryan."

Her eyes showed that she didn't believe him.

"There is a man coming." _She had to believe._ "He only wants to fight Ryan. I promised to tie you up, but I haven't done a very good job. You can get out of it and get free. Are you listening? Listen! He has Sharla-at least he did. By now he's either let her go or killed her. I have to go and try to find her."

Cat could see that he believed what he said. That frightened her more being knocked down and tied up. She opened her mouth to roar, but he had taken out a piece of duct tape and slid it across her face, stopping any noise above a muffled grunt.

"I'm sorry," he said, lightly touching a spot on her cheekbone and then her forehead where she could feel the tightening of bruises.

"I'm not supposed to be involved," he said aloud-but to himself-scratching at the tattoo on his wrist like a persistent chicken pock. In a moment, he had her ankles taped as well.

There were heavy footsteps in the corridor, and Jack sprang to attention. It occurred to him that he had done it all wrong. Not protesting harder against being booted out into the field, not immediately leaving town when he received Alan's note, agreeing to get into the apartment in exchange for Sharla's life. He had failed. _Observe and record and never interfere._ His records were in the hands of a volatile immortal and here he was playing some sick, unforgivable part in the whole affair. "He's going to kill me now," he realized, still speaking out loud, and moved to tape over Caitlin's eyes as well. "You don't need to see this."

She jerked her head back and briefly out of his way.

The noise of footfalls had stopped somewhere behind her and a Southern voice drawled out, "Good job, son. I always do like to reward a good job."

She could not see who was there, but she felt Jack tumble forward and off of her back. Heard his shoulders hit the hard floor.

The other man laughed, and when she turned toward the body she saw that Jack had no head. She felt something warm seeping into her shirt and hair. Her breath quickened when she realized that it was blood. The blood of the man who had tied her up. She felt like she was in a dream. A nightmare over which she had no control. She wanted to cry and scream and pray all at once. She was breathing so hard and so be-labored through her nose that she hyperventilated and passed out.

She came to when the second man picked her up. Grabbed her by an arm and leg and chucked her onto the bed. He was clumsy and disinterested with how she fell, and her head knocked hard against the headboard. He turned her face-up.

He was a big man. Heavy and full-bearded. He had brown hair and small eyes set deep into his fat face. He wore a cowboy hat with a stars and bars band on it, emblazoned with the name Macon. Leaning close to her he said, "don't you worry, little lady. I'm just gonna need you around 'til your man comes home. Then you can go join old Jack over there." He laughed.

He walked across the room to the table and pulled up one of the chairs. He took out a leather-bound notebook and began to read to himself. She could see that his lips moved as he read.

The first thing that occurred to Cat was that she was going to die without receiving last rites. The second thing was that it was quite possible that Richie would come home and fight this man and win and she would not die.

But that seemed less likely. Richie would not be expecting to find someone here, least of all someone who had tied her up to use as leverage. He had told her stories about how immortals-good fighters-had had their mortal partners used against them. They had given in to fights they would otherwise have won. She had no intention of playing that role.

Swallowing her fear, she let herself get angry-something she had not allowed herself for years-and began to test the knots to see if Jack Preston had indeed been telling the truth.

She fed herself on everything she had repressed. She made herself remember how Sister Joseph had broken dishes in the wash, and blamed her. How Sister Marie had falsely accused her of gossip. The way Tracey, her college roommate, had taken things without asking, how she would incorrectly tally up the phone bill and stick her with paying the larger half. She fanned the flames of her rage with the image of Mitch's solitary funeral. How he had left her, and how she had waited that long, long day for her mother to return and take her back. And how she was left instead with an old woman who knew nothing about children except that they were best seen and not heard.

Some time later, Richie still had not come home. Macon had fallen asleep at the table, his reading apparently more taxing than he had expected. And Cat was still on the bed trying desperately to get out of her bonds. Her wrists were raw, and she suspected bleeding, from her constant twisting and turning to find the promised weakness in the binding.

Finally, believing that Richie would come home any moment, she managed to grasp her left hand in her right and squeeze with all her strength, snapping her thumb out of joint. Tears rolled from her eyes, but she didn't stop to wipe them before they fell onto the silver tape over her mouth. She was too busy struggling with the cord and tape around her ankles. Tough with two workable thumbs, with one, even tougher.

Macon stirred in his chair.

Her now-frantic movement had caused the box springs to squeak. She got her ankles untied and realized that she had come up with no plan of what to do after she was free.

She did not have much time to think about it, though. Macon had risen from the table and was hurtling across the room at her, sword in hand.

"Girlie," he shouted, "now don't you get any ideas!"

__

Under the mattress, her memory prodded. _He keeps the claymore there._ She rolled across the bed, to Richie's side, and pulled the long, two-handed sword out from between the mattress and box springs. Getting her left hand around the grip, she tucked her still-dislocated thumb under her fingers, pressing as tightly as she could. She wrapped her right hand around the grip as well, and brought the heavy sword up to meet his blow. She had not had time to peel off the tape over her mouth.

He came back at her harder, and to counter their height difference, she jumped onto the bed, finding her footing difficult on the mattress, but not impossible. Her defense was wild and erratic, her offense non-existent.

She successfully parried whatever blows he struck, then waited for the next. Macon took advantage of her patient anticipation, and feinted broadly to the right. She followed with him, leaving her left side open and exposed. His sword sliced down the length of her upper arm like a cleaver through an over-ripe tomato.

In that moment she saw stars, and out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Jack's body. She thought she might faint.

Macon saw it too, the greenish cast that fell over her after first blood. He thought his greatest concern was that she might puke on him.

He was wrong.

Something came together for Cat, prodded by pain and defenselessness, by the lack of oxygen she was getting. While Macon was ready to congratulate himself and begin to tie her up once more, she used the claymore's point and sliced him open from side to side. His guts gaped like a giant smile on a Halloween pumpkin. The next move, ingrained in her through practice and repetition, operated on a level all its own. Richie had drilled her on it so many times, it was all but unconscious. She brought the sword back up, behind her head, swinging like she was hitting one into the stands.

She didn't remember what happened next, didn't remember losing her grip on the claymore and sending it flying across the room to embed in the far wall just above the crucifix, didn't recall seeing his head separate from his body. She didn't feel her muscles respond when she crossed the room to retrieve the sword. Her eyes were open, it should have registered, but something inside of her had shut off the lights.

* * *

Richie was surprised to come home and see the door open. He had been trying to get a new license for his bike and had run into trouble with some of his paperwork. It had turned into a longer errand than he had anticipated, having to stop at several offices and branches of offices around town to settle things with the department of motor vehicles.

__

I should have called, he thought, _when I knew I was going to miss our practice._ He stepped through the door, uncertain as to what sort of reception he would find. _Would she be angry? Worried?_

He saw a body on the floor in the kitchen.

"Cat," he yelled, but heard no reply. His heart started to do crazy things, his mind not working quite right. He could only think, _What. What._

The body was headless, but from the amount of blood accompanying it, not immortal. He saw the man's wrist. A Watcher. _What was he doing here?_

"Cat!"

Over by the bed, a second body, a large man with a cavalry sword. Headless as well, but immortal headless this time.

"Cat!" he shouted again, racing from space to space, seeing no evidence of her.

He stumbled into the bathroom, glancing around so quickly he almost didn't find her, huddled in the far corner of the tub, obscured by the shower curtain. It was the blood horizontally smeared across the shower wall that caught his attention, as though it were a neon arrow pointing to her. She had dragged his claymore in with her, without having cleaned it from where it had last been used. _Last been used._

Richie's mind refused to believe the conclusions it was drawing. That Cat had killed one, possibly two, of the men outside.

"Cat," he said, softly this time, approaching her like you would approach a wild animal caught in a trap.

Her mouth was gagged with duct tape, which he tried-to no effect-to remove gently. Her lip was already split. Ripping off the tape aggravated it even more. She gasped in response to the shock of the tape coming off, the intake of breath sending blood from the cut lip into her mouth. She did not seem to notice. She was knotted up so tightly he could not even get a good look at her to discern where-or if-she was hurt.

Her eyes were darting everywhere, unable to focus on anything. "He was going to kill you," she said, not letting go her grip on the claymore.

"I know," he said, even though he didn't. "Shhhhh, I know." He extended his hand, in the most non-threatening posture he could imagine. When he took the sword away from her, he saw her arm, the untreated cut along the front of her biceps where the skin was pulling back and away, exposing the muscle like a dissector's example. The way her hand sat limp and useless, the thumb hanging at too great an angle to the other fingers. He could not tell for certain, but the blood that had frightened him the most-that which he had seen in her hair and smeared from her back onto the white bathroom tile-did not seem to be coming from her.

Richie put his hands to her face, training her eyes on him. "We've got to get you to the hospital," he said. "But we have to go through the apartment. Okay?"

She nodded her head slowly.

He wasn't sure she understood. He wasn't sure he understood. He coughed to clear his throat, the barely-remembered sensation of coming tears stinging in his nose.

"I want you to close your eyes," he asked. "Just close them until I tell you that we're clear, all right?"

Again, a slow nod, and she closed her eyes, like a sleepy child.

He lifted her out of the tub as though she were made of thin, breakable glass and carried her to the elevator, careful not to rest his hand too close to her injured arm.

"It's okay, now," he let her know. "I'm going to call us an ambulance from Mrs. Lopez's." He knew he couldn't get her anywhere like this on his bike. "You can open your eyes now." He felt her shake her head gently into his chest.

__

No, the gesture said. _I am not ready to look at anything._

When they got downstairs, and he had set Cat down on the sofa while the stunned Mrs. Lopez went to find some bandages, he called for both an ambulance and a priest.

While they waited, he looked at Cat, her eyes still closed though he knew she wasn't asleep, and rested his hand in her hair. The crop of bruises on her face so like those he had seen on the faces of his friends' mothers in the old neighborhood-one of them so close to her eye it might not open even if she willed it to.

The split lip and deep cut in her arm that, unlike any abuse his limbs might suffer, was not going to heal on its own. Her hand, with a thumb he dared not even touch. Its tendons were already swelling up a deep black-purple, angry at having been forced out of joint. _Had she done that to herself?_ He went to take her other hand in his. Wide bruising against her pale skin, her soft, perfect skin now rubbed raw and ripped open in places like she had been flayed.

Everything was backwards. He was supposed to get beat up, take heads-if necessary defend her. Protect his heart. But now, when he looked into Cat's damaged face, he could not recognize any of the peace and content from before. He could only feel hurt and failure-and fear. Kneeling down beside the couch, he asked himself, "What have I done?"

As if in response, she shivered.

Not knowing what else to do, afraid that any touch or movement might cause her more pain, he let his hand stay in her hair, and repeated, "I'm here, I'm here." He did not know if it would help.

* * *

The same day her stitches came out, the Chicago PD returned both swords. Richie had had to convince them he was a collector and both the claymore and cavalry sword were his. Either that, or answer way too many questions about sword-toting villains. Not that there weren't way too many questions this way as well.

"Why didn't she just use a gun?" one detective whined over the claim of cutting off someone's head in self-defense.

"Because we don't have a gun," Richie had answered. No one seemed to believe him, but as no other witnesses came forward, the case was soon shelved to await further evidence.

"Look at the pictures you took of her that night," he had wanted to shout at them. "Look at what he did. And you have the nerve question the way she defended herself?"

He seethed with anger all of the time he was dealing with the cops, frustrated and impatient. It was better that he hadn't said anything. Better that he not get a reputation. For his own sake as well as Cat's.

* * *

The final doctor visit came, and with it Cat felt she was waking from a dream, or a nightmare. She could not decide which. The pain was gone, all but a little ache sometimes in her arm. There were no visible marks-the doctor had seen to that. She determined to be happy. To feel peaceful. To find a place to store what had happened far away, where it could never hurt her again.

But her body refused to comply with her wishes. She continued to lose weight. She experienced pain under her jaw and arms. She tried to keep these things from Richie. He was already beating himself up over what had happened. She could see it in his eyes. He never left her alone, checked twice to be sure the doors were locked. Became suspicious of anyone who followed them more than two blocks.

But mostly he worried. At night he would wake up next to Cat, who was often feverish, sweating into the sheets. Sometimes in the middle of a nightmare, sometimes not. Once or twice, for no reason, she scratched herself raw in some places. He would hold her close as long as he could, until she calmed and was able to fall back to sleep. He didn't know what else to do. He had never seen someone go through this-their first kill. It wasn't the kind of thing you could get counseling for, because you couldn't tell the whole truth.

It was like her body was failing her. As far as he could see, mentally and emotionally, she seemed to be dealing with what had happened. Slowly, but what could you expect? On those nights, though, he got scared. He was powerless to help fight whatever sort of battle was going on inside her. Still, if he asked, she would assure him that she was going to be okay, that she probably just had a touch of the flu. He tried to tell himself she was right.

* * *

Cat was in the shower one early afternoon when she heard noises of rummaging coming from the apartment. The doors of the armoire opened and shut, drawers in the kitchen slammed and jostled their contents. She forced herself to swallow the fear welling up inside. Rinsing off, she left the water running so the intruder would not be suspicious. She grabbed a towel. The rest of her clothes were lying ready for her on the bed. Wiping water out of her eyes from her still-dripping hair, she smoothly cracked open the door.

There, in the middle of the room, bending over a bag he was packing, stood Richie, wildly throwing anything and everything into his luggage. The bag was small, and many of the things he had piled on the floor refused to fit, so he was constantly unpacking and re-stuffing the contents. She had never seen him quite so agitated.

A breeze of warm air from the bathroom alerted him that she was watching, and he paused long enough to turn to her.

"I have to leave," he said.

Sure that she had misheard him, Cat walked across the room to where he was. "No," she corrected him. "_We_ have to leave."

__

You tried this before, Richie said to himself. _But did it work with Donna and Jeremy? No. So what if this time you tried to do it differently? So you tried to teach her how to fight, so you loved her as much as your own heart. In the end, it all got you nowhere if you couldn't protect her when it really mattered._

"I'm being chased," he told her, trying to keep his voice calm. "I lost him downtown, but I can't seem to lose him for long."

__

No, no. She realized that she was cold.

"I'm getting a few things here, and then I have to split," Richie said. "Just until I can get him out of the city, away from you."

"It's a friend of his, isn't it?" She never used Macon's name.

"Yes," Richie conceded. "His name is Carrothers." He shook his head. There was no time to talk. "I have to go, get him away from you." His mind spiraled back to the things he needed to tell her. "Use the cash machine card if you need money. Everything else should be taken care of."

"Can you kill him?" She forced the words out from where they had stuck in her throat.

"Probably, I'm not sure." So much for a ringing endorsement of his skill.

He reached down beside himself on the floor and retrieved his sword. "I'm only taking this one," he said. "The other two are staying here." He couldn't quite bring himself to reference her using them.

The last thing he was trying to stuff into his bag, a notebook, refused to fit, and he abandoned the idea of taking it along. Instead, he extended it to Cat, who took it with one hand.

"I found this," he told her. "That day, on the table. It's the Watcher's notes-of us."

They each held the book with one hand, hers still damp and staining the leather cover. She used it to pull him to her, clutching at him like she couldn't find a hold, a spot to hang on to.

"You keep it," he said, and she nodded.

"I love you," she choked on the words.

They kissed with the force that comes from knowing every other force on earth is in the process of pulling you apart. Like two lovers in a giant centrifuge about to start, flinging them to opposite sides, separating them indefinitely.

Richie's hand went to her temple, and he stared hard into her face, searching for something to take with him. "I'm coming back," he promised. "Do you hear me? I'm coming back. This is not forever."

She took his hand away from her temple and laid it across the bare skin over her heart, beating as quickly and manically as his own.

His eyes swam in tears that refused to spill over. "This is not forever," he said, and kissed her again. Hard this time, desperate, a clash of teeth and tongue colliding against each other, with no time for grace or finesse.

Turning on his heel, bag in one hand, sword in the other, he left without looking back, to find the trail of the other immortal and lure him far away from Cat.

Cat didn't get dressed right away, didn't go back to the bathroom to dry herself off. Instead she sat cross-legged on the floor where his bag had been sitting not too long ago and let herself collapse into the pile of his clothes that he had not been able to pack, his scent still there, despite the fact that he had left. For a moment she buried her face into his shirts, then she opened the leather notebook to read. She did not cry.

_After all, he had promised,_ she echoed to herself. _It was not forever._

Richie paused for a moment in the alley below the building on St. John's Street, and looked up to the fourth floor, as close to heaven as he felt he ever needed to get. There were hundreds, thousands, of memories there for him-and more to be made. He didn't have to imagine Cat against the glass, watching him go. He felt sure he could see her, a small but perfect angel, her wings wrapped up inside a ratty afghan, waiting for him to return.

For now he would run, he would fight. He would do what was necessary. But he would be back, and he would find her.

* * *

...

* * *

**Appendix**

With Jack Preston's death, Watcher records on Richie Ryan became sporadic and largely speculative. He ran only far enough from Jefferson Davis (J.D.) Carrothers to keep a safe distance between Cat and Carrothers before fighting him.

According to Carrothers' chronicle-which ended just after the Quickening-the match occurred near a rest stop just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. It was not particularly exciting, nor it would seem notable, as the entry is rather brief. No more than three lines.

Carrothers' Watcher, though, aware that Ryan had no one permanently assigned to him as yet, took a few notes on the other immortal after the fight. Such as the fact that once the effects of the Quickening had subsided Ryan made for the nearest pay phone, direct dialing a number in Chicago that corresponded to the building his previous Watcher had been regularly monitoring at the time of his death. A quick star 69 showed that no one answered at that number, and no machine was in service to take messages.

Unfortunately, when said Watcher-now freed up for the rest of the day-was eating a hearty post-Quickening lunch, he spilled coffee on most of his notes, and that one, never vital to Carrothers' chronicle to begin with, was lost in a flood of decaf.

According to corroborating Watcher accounts, before Ryan was able to return to Illinois he was challenged twice more. In response to these challenges, he inexplicably ran in the opposite direction to which he had originally been travelling, further distancing himself from Chicago.

Due to a Watcher shortage of field agents, a young woman was temporarily assigned to him by the time he reached Chicago a month and a half later. As far as his new Watcher could tell, he was searching for a nun. She was unable to find out why, either from her contacts, or the very sparse report that had survived from when he had last been in the city.

When someone with more experience became available, she was immediately relocated and Jean-Pierre Riposte was given Richie Ryan, just in time for the trip to Paris.

They had not been in the city more than two weeks when Ryan and MacLeod attended the opera together.

As the two walked slowly home to the barge that evening, Jean-Pierre made a note of Ryan's statement that "watching some guy go on and on about his lost love just seems a little irrelevant to me." It was unfortunate, that with the loss of Jack Preston's notes, Jean-Pierre's ears were not attuned to the new cynicism and forced air of casualness with which his assignment spoke.

Before the week was out, Joe Dawson had reported Richie Ryan dead at the hand of his teacher Duncan MacLeod, and Riposte had been relegated to a nearby sanitarium for observation. He claimed to have seen a demon, and twice tried to take his own life.

Two weeks later he had discharged himself, recanting his entire story. He has not been heard from again, either by the Watchers or by his family, which received the usual financial package for Watchers dying in the line of duty. It is believed he may have left the country.

Richie Ryan's chronicle was never found. At headquarters, it is listed as _missing, thought destroyed_. Except the part of Ryan's history that overlapped into Duncan MacLeod's 1990's chronicle , there is very little on record to show that the promising, well-liked immortal existed at all.

As far as Watcher policy, no hearing will be able to rule the chronicle sealed and complete unless Riposte can be found to corroborate the testimony of Joe Dawson, leaving the file on Richie Ryan for now marked _closure deferred._

**_The End_**  
111899

* * *

**DISCLAIMERS**

**CHARACTERS::**Richie Ryan, Duncan MacLeod, Tessa and Amanda are not mine. They belong to Panzer-Davis/Rysher/Gaumont.  
Caitlin, Jack Preston, Macon and J.D. Carrothers are my own inventions, as well as all other characters in the story not listed above. I am not particularly attached to any of them except Cat, so if you want to borrow somebody else, just ask.  
**TIMELINE::**Hard to puzzle out, this was, but going something like:  
*(Seacouver) _Money No Object, Haunted, The Messenger_  
*Richie gets on his bike to find answers to 'the big questions'  
*Richie dies in Cat's arms on El platform in Chicago (my _If I Should Not Return_)  
***my _(Less than) 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover_ begins  
*Richie leaves Chicago  
*_Valkyrie, Comes A Horseman, Rev. 6:8_ (action moves from Seacouver to Paris)  
*_The Ransom of Richard Redstone, Duende_. After leaving Cat, Richie tries his hand at various ways to forget her, including pretty Marina LeMartin.  
*Richie returns to Cat, drunk  
*Macon shows up and is killed  
*Cat begins to show signs of cancer; Non-Hodgkin's Aggressive Lymphoma  
***J.D. Carrothers causes Richie to flee, in hopes of protecting Cat (End my _(Less than) 50 Ways_)  
**BEGIN INTERIM INFORMATION**  
*Cat becomes too ill to care for herself. Sisters arrive from North Dakota, to move her home and nurse her through her extensive hospitalization and treatment.  
*Richie is delayed in returning to Chicago. Pursued by other immortals, he is reluctant to bring them anywhere near Cat  
*Diagnosed as terminal, Cat stays in North Dakota, not wanting to burden Richie with her illness, or send him any word at all. The Sisters whom she has told about him agree to honor her decision.  
*When Richie returns to Chicago, he can find no trace of Cat, nor anyone to tell him where she has gone.  
*After much searching, he abandons hope of finding her, and assumes she doesn't want to be found. He has no knowledge of her cancer. Decides that she was too traumatized by killing Macon to ever want to see him again.  
*Richie travels back to Paris, heart-broken and cynical. He never finds the right time to bring up what happened in Chicago. Even so, he can't stop himself from sending the occasional note or post card in the hopes that it might reach her.  
*_Archangel_  
*A year later, her body worn-out from repeated attempts to curb her disease, Cat is sent home to Sacred Heart Monastery to await death. (my _If I Should Not Return_)  
*Less than six months later (unknown to her) she dies in the night, after secretly being taken off life support machines by Sister Brigid, who decides Cat has suffered enough.  
*Believing herself miraculously healed, and having no knowledge of her own immortality, Cat begins a search for Richie. Bert Myers owes a favor to someone in the Order. Through him Cat is given the address of Nick Wolfe in Paris.  
*Having decided that Richie may be using an alias, or has possibly disappeared in a further effort to protect her, Cat searches for Duncan MacLeod and a clue to Richie's whereabouts.  
*(my _If I Should Not Return_ begins)  
**TITLE/EPIGRAPH::**"50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" is the title of a song by Simon and Garfunkel (The song's lyrics have no particular meaning here).  
The quotations from the epigraph are from the very last moments of _HLTS: The Messenger_. That episode was written by David Tynan and has been quoted here without his permission.  
THE POEM::Ah, a good Scottish verse, and where to turn for such things but to Robert (1759-1796) Burns?  
**A Red, Red Rose** "O, my luve's like a red, red rose/That's newly sprung in June./O my luve's like the melodie/That's sweetly played in tune./As fair are thou, my bonnie lass,/So deep in love am I;/And I will love thee still my dear,/Till a' the seas gang dry./Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,/And the rocks melt wi' the sun;/And I will love thee still, my dear/While the sand o' life shall run./And fare thee well, my only luve,/And fare thee well a while!/And I will come again my luve,/Though it were ten thousand mile!"  
Mind you, when Richie's quoting in the story, he gets some of it wrong, leaves out some of the dialectical spelling, etc. But don't blame him, he was really quite drunk. I know, I was there;)  
As you were priorly warned, it's best if you have read my _If I Should Not Return_ before digging in here. Its epigraph is a re-writing of the above poem. This time as a song, by Mary Chapin Carpenter. "Fare thee well, my own true love./Fare well for awhile, I'm going away./But I'll be back,/Though I go ten-thousand miles./Ten-thousand miles, my own true love,/Ten-thousand miles or more./The rocks may melt,/And the seas may burn,/If I should not return."  
I looked long and hard to try and find out where her inspiration for these lyrics was from, finally recalling Burns' poem. Yet another piece echoes _some_ of Burns' sentiment. This one is also from Scotland. The Proclaimers' hit in the early 90s of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)." It went a little something like this (relying on memory now): "And I would walk 500 miles,/And I would walk 500 more,/Just to be the man who walked 1000 miles to fall down at your door." Hmmmm.  
**AUTHOR'S NOTE::**This story was originally titled, _Kyrie eleison:While the Sands of Life Shall Run._ What a mouthful-change is good.  
I've decided to call this Raven arc, _Fare Thee Well._ That would make this story ground zero-the technical first in the series, time-wise, but probably best if read after events in my _If I Should Not Return_ (the first in the series).  
As far as any questions about Richie's Watcher, Jack is entirely my own invention. I am too poor, I confess, to purchase whatever season of _Highlander_ that comes with the complete Watcher Chronicles, so I don't know what they say about who was assigned to him, etc. I do hope I haven't violated anything too important to the canon.  
Likewise, I'm never sure how much time passes between episodes, as you can see from the above timeline. Even so, I doubt that Duncan and the gang would literally have had one adventure per week-with adventure-free lives during hiatus, and every fourth week or so, a comedic happenstance.  
**LYMPHOMA::**In the final bit, Cat begins to suffer the symptoms of Non-Hodgkin's aggressive Lymphoma, a type of cancer. Symptoms include lymph swelling, weight loss, fever, nights sweats, and unwarranted itching. For more information about lymphoma, and other types of cancers, visit on-line.  
**THE ORDER OF SAINT BENEDICT::**Any resemblance to the actual Sacred Heart Monastery in Richardton, North Dakota, or the beliefs, dressing standard, and daily lives of actual Benedictine nuns is purely co-incidental.  
No misrepresentation or disrespect was intended. I simply was unable to spend a great deal of time researching that part of the narrative. Those interested can begin to learn more about such things at .net/bismarck/shm/ the site of Sacred Heart Monastery.


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